License: registerware, nagware (asks for upgrade to pro version)
Free vs. Pro
Steps:
1. Extract with 7-zip
2. Select "yes to all" when prompted to overwrite files
3. Launch FlashBack Recorder.exe
4. Program complains about stuff not being installed but seemed to work fine
Cool features:
- Click and scroll wheel indicators are awesome, better than anything I've yet used
- Good framerate settings (I recommend 8 per second)
- A variety of recording limits including size, sections (breaking into X meg files), and time
- Can reduce file sizes by disabling video extras like graphic effects, wallpaper, and showing window contents while dragging
- Will record audio and the webcam (which can be minimized for the final vid)
- Recording schedules and will record applications at start. This is really great if you need to see what a program is doing (and potentially why it's failing).
Odd, Unclear, or Broken:
- Cropping - it great but it depends on the mouse; if you don't move the mouse over what you're trying to show, it won't show up. It's ideal for smaller (around 640x480) windows where the screen borders aren't necessary to the demonstration.
- Flash video oddities - output settings are very weird surrounding the Flash video export, specifically (I think) an inability to export to anything but a container SWF if you use videos generated in mpeg mode (the default). You've got to set it to lossless (GDI) mode in Recorder Options - Record Mode / Performance. I'm still not toally sure what's going on here.
- Notes only partially functional - The rather cool notes system doesn't work outside of the SWF setting mentioned in the point above
- Audio collusion - Can record both system audio and microphone audio but unfortunately it doesn't export them to separate tracks so you can't edit them separately. You're better off using a separate recording device for your microphone altogether and importing that audio into your editor.
- Keystrokes and modifiers - although the program captures these (including ctrl, shift, alt) I can't seem get them to output them into the video
- Not sure what audio quality "low, normal, high" means
- Ability to export to formats with any kind of real compression apart from an old version of Flash. Alternatively you can save it to one of the very basic default compression settings like Microsoft Video or Uncompressed (not recommended as files are *HUGE*) and then just use something like V2V to compress it.
- Any ability to cut (again, V2V could help here but it's a fair number of extra steps)
Status: not even vaguely portable. Breaks when you move paths and writes garbage everywhere:
- Registry: HKU/../Software/Blueberry Software and HKLM/SOFTWARE
- Filesystem: ProgramData\Blueberry, Users\All Users\Blueberry, Users\USER\Documents, Users\USER\AppData. I'm not sure but it might also call your mom, give you tattoo, and beam additional settings data to the moon.
Home:
http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/BBFlashBack_FreePlayer.aspx
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia ... ress.shtml